Hi all,
With pretty much all the soundcards and speaker combo's I've had over the years (I'm a light casual user and so not forking out for top of the range stuff) I've always heard a constant hissing noise from my PC when it is switched on coming down the speakers.

My sound cards have always been creative ones (Awe64, Creative Live! value, etc) but not top of the range ones and my speakers were around 60 pounds if I recall and had pretty good reviews at the time for that price range.


Basically wondering what causes this and what it would take to setup my computer again without this?

I tried the ASIO drivers once for my creative and if I recall correctly, this didn't get rid of it either.


Thanks

Creative Labs cards are certainly not very good, but they should not be doing what you describe!

Has this been happening with different speakers too? Different computers?

Any common parts at all through all this?


Try opening the volume control (start / run / sndvol32.exe) and Mute All. Does it go away? If not, it may be some kind of electrical problem (start checking for ground loops etc. is your equipment properly grounded?).

If it goes away when you mute all, unmute and start muting the other channels one after another and see if it goes away that way. You may need to go into the volume control options and enable more volume controls (for example microphone in, cd in, tad in, line in, pc speaker in could all be passing through noise)

If this doesn't do it, consider getting an M Audio Delta 2496. It's less than $100, has RCA outputs to connect to your stereo system, and it's an extremely well performing card for the price.

Probably a grounding problem. My soundcard is connected to my amp via a stereo (cinch->RCA) cable and I was able to mute down the hissing and mouse/hdd/LAN noise significantly by disconnecting my crappy turntable (yep!) from my amp. The turntable got its power from a power socket at the back of the amp and was also grounded via an extra wire with the amp's case. That combination was probably acting like an antenna or something like that.

Anything is possible and might be causing this noise. So try out to anything.